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Bungie's Destiny Unveiled [Updated]

[UPDATE April 1] In the section on storyline, etc. below, I’ve added updated information that I have reconfirmed directly with the Activision press office. The updates regarding Destiny include new, confirmed information about the game’s three new races, with fresh, detailed insights on the three character classes and four enemy combatant classes in the game that Bungie discussed at GDC 2013. I also added the video of Bungie’s Destiny panel at GDC 2013 to my GDC 2013: The ‘Brave New World’ of Bungie’s Destiny post.

The North American press corps was all on hand Wednesday at Bungie Studios in Bellevue, Wash. for the game developer’s unveiling of the first details of Destiny, Bungie’s new online persistent world game. I joined the tour of their facility and participated in a series of press conferences on the game’s storyline, lore,technical details, gameplay and much more. Destiny has landed, and Bungie fans the world over are waiting to see if Bungie will disrupt the industry with what appears to be, at first look, a ground-breaking “metamedia” experience.

Here is everything I learned about Bungie’s Destiny during my visit to the Bellevue, Wash. studio of the creators of the Halo universe.

Storyline / lore / races / character classes The story arc of Bungie’s new online persistent world game, Destiny engulfs the human experience, casting us 299,792,458 meters per second — 700 years into the future . . .

The Traveler, a massive, Moon-sized globe, hangs over the Earth, emanating a mysterious source of power and strength. The Traveler has finally brought sanctuary to the human race — humankind, who finally had mastered technology. The humans who had built the Golden Age unified technology into their culture and had skillfully adapted environments far beyond the confines of Earth, expanding human colonies throughout the Milky Way to Mars, Venus and the Moon.

Cassini Derelict. Image courtesy of Bungie, Inc.

The heroes of the Golden Age had formed genial hybrid structures that moulded their mechanistic forms into the landscape, forming advanced citadels with domes, spires, towers and plazas. These techno-pioneers had synthesized the powerful implements of technology into potent, mechanistic bodysuits, powerful, destructive weapons and lightning-fast space vessels with highly developed weapons systems.

Vex. Image courtesy of Bungie, Inc.

But the Golden Age wasn’t to last. All manner of hate-mongering alien lifeforms stealthily crept into this human-inhabited galaxy and hit humanity hard with their brute force and thundering strength. The fearsome Cabal are hulking, armored rhinoceros-like aliens, carrying slug throwers and driving big tanks. These ungainly troll-like creatures destroy with abandon. The Fallen are agile, four-armed insectoid aliens that relish the darkness. The Vex are time-traveling aliens, whose advanced robotic machine bodies never tire of killing with their jagged swords. The Hive are dirty-yellowish, skeletal-like aliens with cloven hoofs, claws and long, razor-sharp teeth.

Players will be able to select from three different races to customize their character — creating their own persona, their own unique hero in Destiny’s universe. Races in Destiny offer both familiar and strange possibilities for the choosing. The Humans are relatable to our kind, tough and uncomplicated. They have the attributes of soldiers, sports stars and action heroes. The Awoken are exotic, beautiful, ethereal and mysterious beings, modeled after vampires, elves, ghosts and angels. The Exo are sinister, powerful and tireless war machines. They have the attributes of the Terminator, the undead and Master Chief himself.

Races of Destiny. Images courtesy of Bungie, Inc.

The brave human survivors of this hellishly fierce onslaught picked up the remains of Earth’s civilization and began anew. They built the Last City, under the shade of the Traveler’s protective umbra. They formed a hierarchy of classes, the fighting vanguard of Humanity. They would fight this new threat to human existence, and would call themselves the Guardians. The Titans. The Warlocks. The Hunters. They harness the power of the Traveler to power up and fight those who would destroy the Earth.

The Titans are the techno-Praetorian Guards, protectors of the Last City, who are equipped with powerful weapons and indomitable advanced mechanistic suits of fierce, devastating power. They are the future-soldier, the space marine. Titans are the indomitable, ultra-equipped tech-fighters of the Last City. The Warlocks are space wizard with dark face masks and large, heavy cloaks. They are heavily armed with high-powered guns, but wield spells to complement their weapons, overwhelming their enemies with their own ancient, deep powers. Finally, the Hunters are the reconnaissance masters of the Last City. They are bounty hunters, explorers and frontiersmen with hood and cape-covered armor. Hunters operate with rustic panache in the wild — seeking, finding and destroying those lurking in unexplored regions, waiting to stamp out Humankind’s seed.

Hunter, Warlock, and Titan Guardians. Image courtesy of Bungie, Inc.

These three character classes are the protectors of the Last City, the last brave ones, who stand at Earth’s last urban safe place. They have the burden of defending the Last City, of defeating the aliens and reclaiming the humanity that we all lost along the way. These brave soldiers of Earth have begun to explore the former colonies of Mars and her red dunes of sand, Venus and her luxuriant jungle foliage, once showpieces of teeming, enterprising Terran culture and intellect, now the rubble of ancient ruins. But the enemy is everywhere. They are now the benighted Guardians of the Last City. They are the knights of old, reforged, fighting against an implacable enemy whose sole purpose is to erase our presence from the surface of the Earth forever.

Citadel enemy zone. Image courtesy of Bungie, Inc.

The theme of Destiny‘s persistent world is, above all else, hope, an ancient trope and a pervasive theme of video games. Players take up arms as a Guardian of the Last City. And if you are on the side of the Guardians, you are on the side of good. Players will always be on the on side of humanity, and according to Bungie, players will encounter a rich experience in the game.

Platform / fee structure The game will launch on the XBOX 360 and PS3, and Bungie has not yet revealed any plan for cross-platform development. Bungie has confirmed that the game will not have subscription fees, but it remains to be seen it they will implement the microtransactions of in-game merchandise or other possible options.

Development According to Project Director Jason Jones, Destiny has seven core features which have guided it’s development since 2009. Here are the Seven Pillars of Destiny’s development, along with some select quotes from Jones.

Pillar 1: A World Players Want to Be In “…the most important stories we tell aren’t going to be told by us. They’re going to be told by players – their personal legends built from shared adventures.” Pillar 2: A Bunch of Fun Things to Do “It’s a place where I can leave my mark.” Pillar 3: Rewards Players Care About “a lot of great things to earn, find, and make…” Pillar 4: A New Experience Every Night “every time you sit down to play Destiny you have a different experience than last time.” Pillar 5: Shared With Other People “Everything that’s fun to do is more fun to do with your friends…” Pillar 6: Enjoyable By All Skill Levels “All core activities can be enjoyed by a novice player…” Pillar 7: Enjoyable by the Impatient and Distracted [players] “don’t want to work hard, they don’t want to read, and they don’t want to go to the Internet to figure out our bullshit.”

Earth's Moon in tectonic upheaval. Image courtesy of Bungie, Inc.

The game is being characterized by Bungie as an “expansive, persistent, online world,” however it is not an MMO. Bungie’s engineering lead, Chris Butcher, shot down the “MMO theory” circling in the press and video game circles. But, Bungie has invented a new term for Destiny: “the world’s first shared world shooter.” As far as platforms go, the game will be not just be playable on consoles, but will also have a companion app on the iOS platform, where players can continue to interact with each other, receive notifications of new content drops, and review the level stats of their characters. Bungie confirms that “in-game interaction will include ‘ideas’ to bring people together.”

The game was developed with a state-of-the-art, proprietary game engine called Grognok that can deploy and edit terrain, objects, maps as well as lighting and audio. The tool operates as a cooperative development platform, which enables the team to have shared access in real time to objects, models, environments in course of development. There are astoundingly luminous lighting effects in a relatively new technology called “ambient occlusion.” Ambient occlusion is a lighting technique used to give models a global illumination-like effect, as if it were lit from the entire hemisphere (rather than a point light).

Hellmouth enemy zone. Image courtesy of Bungie, Inc.

Implemented in partnership with Nvidia Research, this technique allows rendered game objects to take on astoundingly higher luminosity, intensity and shading effects that change in real time. Changes such as time of day and the weather will be displayed in the game’s environment. Players will be able to demonstrably see the difference as they stand and watch the sun set over The Last City, or the moon come out in the landscapes of Destiny‘s highly graphically nuanced game environment.

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agreed, great article Michael! I’ve played Halo since Combat Evolved (mostly on the PC version) and every game since… dedicated hundreds of hours into them over the years. I have no doubt in my mind that this will be a game-changer much like Combat Evolved was back in the day… with the social aspects they’ve integrated especially.

The Halo series are in good hands with 343 now :) It was about time Bungie had moved onto another IP :)

Thanks. I remember how Combat Evolved was the talk of the town, and first playing the game. Now I curiously feel ancient. But Microsoft has done a great job with it’s redesign of the game, to be sure. I interviewed Frank O’Connor on some of the science fiction aspects of Halo 4.

If all that is promised gets delivered, it will be a ground-smashing IP.

Just looks like an MMOFPS to me, they did a lot of hyping and even this article seems to gush about the graphical fidelity, but it wasn’t impressive at all in that department, but then it’s launching on the X360 so it’s not hard to understand why it isn’t impressive.

The art direction is inspiring, the idea is generic but appears well executed, the in game footage wasn’t even worth watching. They put a lot of effort into the reveal, but the substance was lacking, I leave feeling not unimpressed, but not particularly caring.

I think it’s all a matter of terms. Bungie confirms that the FPS element of the game will be a core experience of the player. I do think that certain “Halo-ish” properties are creeping up in some of the object designs in the current build (structures and body armor, particularly) demonstrated at the press conference. Every studio in video game development at this point stands on the shoulders of graphic giants who have gone before them. That’s what makes next-gen games so fascinating, that they push the graphical envelope, this aimed at the capacity of the XBOX 720′s 800MHz graphics processor. But the results of implementing ambient occlusion in the Bungie cooperative dev tool, Grognok, are stunning and immensely pleasing to my eyes, by any standard of graphical design excellence.

I am definitely very interested in this game. My biggest question is whether it is better to get it on one of the current consoles or one of the next-gen consoles since it is apparently coming out for both. Decisions . . .

That’s an easy one, actually. You sound like you might be an early adopter, in which case, you’ll probably get the next-gen console. It’s always good to test out technology when it first comes out. You have your own learning curve, you can teach your friends about the new hardware and you’ll be equipped with the new hardware to play the latest games. And if you’re worried about budget, you can trade in your old console for the next-gen one at GameStop.

Bungie made the Halo franchise the pinnacle of gaming. With the spartan soldier, Master Chief, they changed the way 1st person shooters were played. I can’t wait to see them try to top it with Destiny!

Me too. If you happen to live in the Puget Sound area, you could apply to Bungie Studios as a playtester. They use playtesters on a regular basis to study their reactions to the game, get community input, and, of course, feedback on the game mechanics, etc.